Wide range of applications such as disaster management, military and security have fueled the interest in sensor networks during the past few years. Sensors are typically capable of wireless communication and are significantly constrained in the amount of available resources such as energy, storage and computation. Such constraints make the design and operation of sensor networks considerably different from contemporary wireless networks, and necessitate the development of resource conscious protocols and management techniques. This course provides a broad coverage of challenges and latest research results related to the design and management of wireless sensor networks. Covered topics include network architectures, node discovery and localization, deployment strategies, node coverage, routing protocols, medium access arbitration, fault-tolerance, and network security.

Learning Objectives:

By the completion of the course, you should be able to:

·         Architect sensor networks for various application setups.

·         Explore the design space and conduct trade-off analysis between performance and resources.

·         Assess coverage and conduct node deployment planning.

·         Devise appropriate data dissemination protocols and model links cost.

·         Determine suitable medium access protocols and radio hardware.

·         Prototype sensor networks using commercial components.

·         Provision quality of service, fault-tolerance, security and other dependability requirements while coping with resource constraints.

·         Evaluate the performance of sensor networks and identify bottlenecks.

Reference Books:

Protocols and Architectures for Wireless Sensor Networks

Holger Karl, Technical University of Berlin

Andreas Willig, University of Potsdam

Wiley, ISBN: 0-470-09510-5, June 2005

Course Outline

1. Applications and Design Model

o Examples of available sensor nodes

o Sample sensor networks applications

o Design challenges

o Contemporary network architectures

o Operational and computational models

o Performance metrics

o Software and hardware setups

2. Network Bootstrapping

o Sensor deployment mechanisms

o Issues of coverage

o Node discovery protocols

o Localization schemes

o Network clustering

3. Data dissemination and routing

o Query models

o In-network data aggregation

o Robust route setup

o Coping with energy constraints

4. Physical and Link layers

o Radio energy consumption model

o Power management

o Medium access arbitration

o Optimization mechanisms

5. Dependability Issues

o Security challenges

o Threat and attack models

o Quality of service provisioning

o Clock synchronization

o Supporting fault tolerant operation

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Grade Structure and Policy

The course will be a combination of Lecture, classroom discussions, student presentation and a class project.

Course Grading Scale:

Course work	Grade distribution
Assignments - Homework (20%) - Paper presentation (15%)	35%
Term Examination	30%
Project	35%

Final grade will computed as follow:

Course grade	Range
A	90% - 100%
B	80% - 89.9%
C	70% - 79.9%
D	60% - 69.9%
F	<60%

Assignments:

Two types of assignments are planned:

1. Homework: Students will be asked to conduct a limited survey on a particular technology or application. The goal is to make them aware of the state of the art and complement the technical coverage in class. Each student will need to prepare 1-2 viewgraphs to summarize the technology/application of their choice. A selected subset of all viewgraphs will be presented in class. Grades will be based on the depth of the technical material (60%) and the quality of the viewgraphs (40%).

2. Paper presentations: Each student will be assigned a research paper selected by the instructor. A list of papers will be made available by the instructor and each student will be given the opportunity to pick a paper that matches his/her interest. The student is required to technically digest the assigned paper and present it in class. The goal is to make the students acquainted with research publications, stimulate class discussion and enrich the course coverage with example techniques from the literature. Grades will be based on the clarity of the oral presentation (30%), depth of understanding the technical material (40%), and the quality of the viewgraphs (30%).

Collaboration with classmates is not permitted unless the assignment explicitly said so. Except for the paper presentation, e-mail submission of assignments prior to class is acceptable.

Exams:

A term exam will be conducted during the UMBC-scheduled final exam period. The exam will be comprehensive. As indicated above the term exam contributes 30% to the final class grade.

Class Project:

The class project is an important component of this course. Students will be able to put their gained knowledge to practice and demonstrates their skills. The project topics should be approved by the instructor. In general two possible arrangements will be allowed:

1. Building a prototype sensor network: The instructor will make available some sensor hardware and wireless interfaces. Students will be permitted to work individually or form groups of 2-5 members, and propose an application. The group is expected to develop the protocols and software and demonstrates a working prototype network that suits the picked application. Students are required to justify all design decisions made and compile that and all learned lessons in a professionally written project report.

2. Investigating an open research problem in the context of wireless sensor networks: For this arrangement a students can work alone or with at most one additional classmate. The students are expected to survey the literature, propose a solution and validate the performance. Students are to prepare a well-written paper that describes the problem, details and justifies the solution and discusses the volition results.

Presentation and demonstrations of projects are scheduled in the last week of classes. Selection of the presenter will be performed by the team members. After the individual's presentation, all team members will participate in addressing any questions posed. The content, arguments and ability to address questions will provide the basis for the presentation score. Project scoring will be based on the following criteria:

Criteria	Points
Understanding the problem and its complexity.	15
Application of the course material.	15
Identifying the design alternatives.	15
Feasibility (practicality) of the approach.	10
Demonstration of data backed decisions.	10
Ability to defend the data (answer questions)	10
Compelling nature of the argument (ability to sell)	5
Organization / Completeness of the presentation.	10
Creativity, development of a unique approach.	10
TOTAL	100

Course Policies:

Course Work

- Failure to complete the required in-class presentations for the reading assignment(s) results in the loss of the entire associated grade.

- Late homework is not accepted unless an extension is preapproved by the instruction.

Academic Integrity

By enrolling is this course, each student assumes the responsibilities of an active participant in UMBC's scholarly community in which everyone's academic work and behavior and held to the highest standards of honesty. Cheating, fabrication, plagiarism, and helping others to commit these acts are all forms of academic dishonesty, and they are wrong. Academic misconduct could result in disciplinary action that may include, but is not limited to, suspension or dismissal. To find useful information about avoiding plagiarism infractions through appropriate citations, or to read the full policy regarding student academic misconduct for the graduate school, please see http://www.umbc.edu/provost/integrity.

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Lecture schedule

#	Date	Subject	Assignments
1	August 31, 2022	Introduction and Overview	1^st Homework is out (Due on Sept/6)
2	September 7, 2022	Sensor Node Architecture	1^st Homework is due
3	September 12, 2022	Sensor-Level Energy Management	2^nd Homework is out (Due on Sept/14)
4	September 14, 2022	Wireless Transmission	2^nd Homework is due
5	September 19, 2022	Wireless Transmission (Cont.)
6	September 21, 2022	Sensor Network Architecture	3^rd Homework is out (Due on Sept/28)
7	September 26, 2022	Medium Access Arbitration	Assign papers to read and present in class.
8	September 28, 2022	MAC Protocols for Sensor Networks	Project proposal discussion
9	October 3, 2022	Guest Speaker: Dr. Lloyd Emokpae Body Area Sensor Networks and Its Application to Physical Therapy Rehabilitation	Project proposal is due.
10	October 5, 2022	Reading Assignments #1, #2	Assign papers to read and present in class.
11	October 10, 2022	Reading Assignments #3 Application Development Environments	4^th Homework is out (Due on Nov/2)
12	October 12, 2022	Network Bootstrapping and Clustering	Assign papers to read and present in class.
13	October 17, 2022	Reading Assignments #4, #5	Assign papers to read and present in class.
14	October 19, 2022	Node Localization Techniques	Assign papers to read and present in class.
15	October 24, 2022	Reading Assignments #6, #7	Assign papers to read and present in class.
16	October 26, 2022	Data Routing	Project progress report is due.
17	October 31, 2022	Reading Assignments #8, #9
18	November 2, 2022	Coverage and Placement Strategies	4^th Homework is due
19	November 7, 2022	Reading Assignments #10, #11
20	November 9, 2022	Tolerance of Nodes Failure
21	November 14, 2022	Reading Assignments #12, #13
22	November 16, 2022	Underwater Sensor Networks
23	November 21, 2022	Reading Assignments #14, #15
24	November 23, 2022	Sensor Network Security	Project progress report is due.
25	November 28, 2022	Reading Assignments #16, #17 #18
26	November 30, 2022	Reading Assignments #19, #20
27	December 5, 2022	Location Privacy (Anonymity)
28	December 7, 2022	Reading Assignments #21, #22
29	December 12, 2022	Term Exam

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Reading Assignments

1.     G. Jolly and M. Younis, " An Energy Efficient, Scalable and Collision less MAC layer Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks ," Journal of Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 285-304, May 2005.

2.     I. Rhee, A. Warrier, M. Aia, J. Min, " Z-MAC: a hybrid MAC for wireless sensor networks ," in the Proceedings of the 3^rd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (Sensys 2005), November 2005.

3.     M. Ali, H. Moungla, M. Younis, and A. Mehaoua, " Efficient Medium Access Arbitration among Interfering WBANs Using Latin Rectangles ," IEEE Journal of Ad Hoc Networks, Vol. 26, No. 79, pp. 87-104, October 2018.

4.     O. Younis and S. Fahmy, " Distributed Clustering in Ad-Hoc Sensor Networks: A Hybrid, Energy-Efficient Approach ," in the Proceedings of the 23^rd INFOCOM 2004, Volume 1, 7-11 October 2004.

5.     M. M. Afsar, and M. Younis, " An Energy- and Proximity-based Unequal Clustering Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks ," in the Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN 2014), Edmonton, Canada, September 2014.

6.     F. Hong, et al., " WaP: Indoor Localization and Tracking Using WiFi-Assisted Particle Filter ," in the Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN 2014), Edmonton, Canada, September 2014.

7.     M. Kotaru, P. Zhang, and S. Katti, " Localizing Low-power Backscatter Tags Using Commodity WiFi ," in the Proceedings of the ACM 13th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT '17), Incheon, Republic of Korea, December 2017.

8. H. Kim, T. Abdelzaher, and W. Kwon, " Minimum-energy asynchronous dissemination to mobile sinks in wireless sensor networks ," in the Proceedings of the 1^st ACM conference on Embedded networked sensor systems (Synsys'03), Los Angeles, CA, November 2003.

9. T. He et al., " SPEED: A stateless protocol for real-time communication in sensor networks ," in the Proceedings of International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, Providence, RI, May 2003.

10. G. Wang, G. Cao, and T. La Porta, " Movement-Assisted Sensor Deployment ," in the Proceedings of 23^rdIEEE INFOCOM, Hong Kong, October 2004.

11. R. Falcon, X. Li and A. Nayak, " Carrier-based Focused Coverage Formation in Wireless Sensor and Robot Networks ," IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Vol. 56, No. 10, pp. 2406 - 2417, 2011.

12. A. Abbas and M. Younis, " Establishing Connectivity among Disjoint Terminals Using a Mix of Stationary and Mobile Relays Computer Communications ," Computer Communications, Vol. 36, pp. 1411-1421, 2013.

13. S. Lee and M. Younis, " EQAR: Effective QoS-Aware Relay Node Placement Algorithm for Connecting Disjoint Wireless Sensor Sub-networks ," IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol. 60, No 12, pp. 1772-1778, November 2011.

14.     A. A. Syed, W. Ye, and J. Heidemann, " Comparison and Evaluation of the T-Lohi MAC for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks ," IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communication, Vol. 26, No. 12, pp. 1731-1743, December 2008.

15. Y, Noh, U. Lee, P. Wang, B. S. C. Choi, and M. Gerla, " VAPR: Void-Aware Pressure Routing for Underwater Sensor Networks ," IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, Vol. 12 , No. 5, pp. 895-908, May, 2013

16. M. Younis, K. Ghumman and M. Eltoweissy, " Location-aware Combinatorial Key Management Scheme for Clustered Sensor Networks ," in the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Vol. 17, No 18, pp. 865-882, August 2006.

17. B. Yu, C.-Z. Xu, and B. Xiao, " Detecting Sybil attacks in VANETs, ," Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, Vol.73, No.6, PP. 746-756, July 2013.

18. A. Alshaeri and M. Younis, " Protocols for Secure Remote Access to Vehicle Onboard Diagnostic Systems in Smart Cities ," IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Magazine, vol. 14, no. 5, pp. 209-221, Sept.-Oct. 2022.

19. M. Ebrahimabadi, M. Younis and N. Karimi, " A PUF-Based Modeling-Attack Resilient Authentication Protocol for IoT Devices ," IEEE Internet of Things Journal, vol. 9, no. 5, pp. 3684-3703, March 2022.

20. M. Younis, W. Lalouani, N. Lasla, L. Emokpae and M. Abdallah, " Blockchain-Enabled and Data-Driven Smart Healthcare Solution for Secure and Privacy-Preserving Data Access ," IEEE Systems Journal, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 3746-3757, Sept. 2022.

21. M. Shao and el al. " Cross-layer Enhanced Source Location Privacy in Sensor Networks ," in the Proceedings of 6th Annual IEEE Conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks (SECON 2009), Rome, Italy, June 2009.

22. N. Baroutis, and M. Younis, " Using Fake Sinks and Deceptive Relays to Boost Base-station Anonymity in Wireless Sensor Network, ," in the Proceedings of the 40th Annual IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN 2015), Clearwater Beach, FL, October 2015.

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Interesting Articles

· Overview & Technical insight:

Ø     F. Akyildiz, W. Su, Y. Sankarasubramaniam, and E.Cayirci, "Wireless sensor networks: a survey," Computer Networks, Vol. 38, No. 4, pp. 393-422, 2002.

Ø     D. Culler, D. Estrin and M. Srivastava, "Overview of Sensor Networks," IEEE Computer Magazine, August 2004.

Ø     Chee-Yee Chong; Kumar, S.P., "Sensor networks: Evolution, opportunities, and challenges," Proceedings of the IEEE, August 2003.

Ø     J. A. Stankovic, T. Abdelzaher, C. Lu, L. Sha, J. Hou, "Real-Time Communication and Coordination in Embedded Sensor Networks," Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 91, No. 7, pp. 1002-1022, July 2003.

Ø     Deborah Estrin, David Culler, and Kris Pister, "Connecting the Physical World with Pervasive Networks," IEEE Pervasive Computing, Vol. 1, No.1 January-March 2002.

Ø     S. Tilak, N. B. Abu-Ghazaleh, and W. Heinzelman, "A taxonomy of wireless microsensor network models," ACM Mobile Computing and Communication Review (MC2R), Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 1-8, 2002.

Ø     L. Schwiebert, S. Gupta and J. Weinmann, "Research Challenges in Wireless Networks of Biomedical Sensors," ACM Mobicomm 2001, pp. 151-165, 2001.

Ø     J.M. Kahn, R. Katz, K. Pister, "Emerging Challenges: Mobile Networking for "Smart Dust," J. Communications and Networks, Vol. 2, No. 3, Sept. 2000.

Ø     G. J. Pottie and W. J. Kaiser, "Wireless integrated network sensors," Communications of the ACM, Vol. 43, No. 5, pp. 51-58, 2000.

Ø     D. Estrin, R. Govindan, J. Heidemann, and S. Kumar, "Next century challenges: Scalable coordination in sensor networks," in: Proceedings of the 5^th IEEE/ACM Annual Conference on Mobile Computing and Networks (MobiCOM'99), Seattle, WA, August 1999.

Ø      http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1744363,00.asp

Ø      http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20030221S0018

Ø      Underwater Sensor Networks: http://www.ece.gatech.edu/research/labs/bwn/UWASN/publication.html

· Applications and Experiments:

Ø     Jeongyeup Paek and Krishna Chintalapudi and John Cafferey and Ramesh Govindan and Sami Masri, "A Wireless Sensor Network for Structural Health Monitoring: Performance and Experience," in the Proceedings of the Second IEEE Workshop on Embedded Networked Sensors (EmNetS-II), Syndney, Australia, May 2005.

Ø     K. Martinez, J. Hart and R. Ong, "Environmental Sensor Networks," IEEE Computer Magazine, August 2004.

Ø     S. Brennan, A. Mielke, D. Torney and A. Maccabe, "Radiation Detection With Distributed Sensor Networks," IEEE Computer Magazine, August 2004.

Ø      M. Maroti, G. Simon, A Ledeczi and J. Sztipanovits, "Shooter Localization in Urban Terrain," IEEE Computer Magazine, August 2004.
Ø     R. Szewczyk, A. Mainwaring, J. Polastre and D. Culler, "An Analysis of a Large Scale Habitat Monitoring Application," Proceedings of ACM SenSys, November 2004.

Ø     K. Mechitov, W. Kim, G. Agha, and T. Nagayama, "High-Frequency Distributed Sensing for Structure Monitoring," Proceedings of the First International Conference on Networked Sensing Systems, Tokyo, Japan, June 2004.

Ø     A.Mainwaring, R. Szewczyk, D. Culler, J. Anderson "Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring" Proceedings of the ACM International Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks and Applications (WSNA), 2002.

· Security:

Ø      A. Perrig, J. Stankovic, D. Wagner, "Security in Wireless Sensor Networks," Communications of the ACM, June 2004.

Ø     D. Carman, P. Kruus, and B. Matt, "Constraints and Approaches for Distributed Sensor Networks Security," NAI Technical Report #00-010, Sep. 2000.

Ø     C. Karlof and D. Wagner, "Secure Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks: Attacks and Countermeasures," Elsevier's AdHoc Networks Journal, Special Issue on Sensor Network Applications and Protocols, vol. 1, pp 293-315, 2003.

Ø     A. Woods and J. A. "Stankovic, Denial of Service Attacks in Sensor Networks," IEEE Computer, October 2002, pp. 54-62.

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Class Project Topics

· Project Ideas (posted on blackboard)

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Interesting Research Links

·         ANRG Sensor Networks Bibliography

·         Networked & Embedded Systems Laboratory (NESL) at UCLA

·         Intel Research Labs: Sensor Nets / RFID

·         National Institute of Standard and Technology

·         Sensor body network

·         Sensor networks research group

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Last Revised: December 2, 2022